We live in a highly digitized world that doesn’t make things easy for business owners, especially if a significant part of their revenue depends on their online presence. Today, most people who need a certain product or service usually go online and turn to Google or another search engine.
However, these users have strict requirements and are unwilling to settle for mediocrity, meaning that around 75% of them will never make it beyond the first page of the search engine’s results. Regardless of whether you’re selling fashionable clothes or something more specific, such as node.js development services, this number may sound quite harsh.
Luckily, there are certain steps a business owner can take to enhance their online presence and have their website appear among the top 10 results on SERPs. All of this can be achieved with the help of search engine optimization (SEO).
With strategically planned efforts, it can help you rank higher in search results, allowing you to increase your visibility and drive more traffic to your website. So, what guidelines should you follow to ensure your website is SEO-friendly?
Why Is an SEO-Friendly Website Important?
Before diving deep into all the details that make a website SEO-friendly, let’s take a step back and determine why it is so important in the first place.
It’s essential to remember that the Internet is a hectic space where everyone is fighting to get as much attention as possible. Some companies choose to invest big bucks in promoting their brands on social media through ads, while others opt for influencer marketing, but the statistics speak for themselves: a whopping 93% of online experiences start with a search engine. Therefore, ensuring that your business appears on the first page of Google SERPs is one of the best choices you can make.
When combined with practices such as blogging and content marketing, following SEO principles is an excellent way to make a name for your brand and grow it online. By creating an SEO-friendly website, you will gain more relevant and organic traffic straight from the search engines, keep people’s attention for longer, and have much higher chances of converting them into customers.
Thanks to the power of SEO, you won’t have to invest as much in advertising or different types of online marketing. Instead, your business will grow more organically and sustainably.
Tips for Creating an SEO-Friendly Site
Building an SEO-friendly website is like sending an invitation to the search engine crawlers, which, thanks to your efforts, will have an easier time assessing it.
Here are the important aspects you should focus on to grasp SEO benefits:
SEO-Friendly Website Architecture
The term “website architecture” may sound quite foreign at first, but it refers to a simple concept of a hierarchical structure of your website pages. This means that the way your pages are structured and linked internally has a massive impact on the search engine’s ability to crawl and understand them.
There’s no doubt that some pages on your websites are more important than others. Google is also aware of this fact and prefers to see them organized in a way that’s easy to understand and navigate for both machines and humans. A good website architecture involves characteristics such as simple navigation, optimized URL structure, using category pages, and creating a site map, among others.
Mobile Optimization
Another easy yet incredibly effective thing you can do to enhance the SEO-friendliness of your website is to optimize it for mobile devices. Not every person around the globe has regular access to a PC or laptop, and many simply prefer to browse the internet on their phones or tablets.
In 2021, Forbes reported that around 2 billion people accessed the internet only using their smartphones. This number is only expected to grow in the future, reaching 3/4th of the internet users by 2025, so the sooner you optimize your website for mobile users, the better.
Luckily, the mobile optimization process doesn’t have to be hard or challenging. For instance, you can start by testing your website using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Opting for mobile-friendly themes and plugins is also a great idea, as well as improving its loading times and choosing a reliable web host.
Internal Linking
Internal linking can be beneficial when trying to boost the rankings of your website. However, as with every other method, you need to follow practices that work instead of blindly adding the links.
When Google crawls a website, the Google bot follows the internal and external links. Once the bot goes on the homepage of your website, the first link it notices will be the one it continues to. This allows a machine to understand all the connections and relationships between different pages within one website. If your content is related in a consistent and easy-to-understand way, then both search engine bots and users will find it more valuable.
To boost your internal linking strategy, you can create many internal pages and saturate them with relevant and helpful content. You can also use tools such as Ahrefs to link to high-authority websites and ensure that your links are contextual.
Still, remember to stay reasonable when it comes to the number of internal links you use. For instance, if your text is 1500 words long, you can add even up to 5 internal links, but if it’s 800 words, you should limit the number of links to 3.
Create Unique Content
As mentioned above, putting out highly relevant and helpful content is known for its effectiveness. However, you can’t expect good results if you fail to recognize the search intent of your clients or disregard it altogether.
“Search intent” is nothing more than simply a purpose of searching. For instance, if your audience is looking for the list of potential benefits that the beauty products you sell are supposed to provide, they will likely google phrases such as “benefits of retinol skincare” or “how to use retinol.”
Then, the search engine will sense the intent and show them pages that feature relevant information about products that contain retinol, not the shop where they can buy them. Therefore, if you take the time to ensure that your website’s content caters to your potential customers’ search intent, you’ll get better results.
Keep in mind that there are four main types of search intent: informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional:
- Informational intent — refers to when users only search for information by typing phrases beginning with “how to…” or just “what are the benefits of…”
- Commercial intent — when people are trying to learn more before making a purchase decision (e.g., “best retinol skincare”).
- Navigational intent — users are trying to find something (e.g., “retinol skin care”).
- Transactional intent — users are trying to complete a specific action (e.g., “buy retinol skincare).
Provide content that’s unique and high-quality. Avoid plagiarism, consider guest blogging, and don’t forget to optimize it for mobile users.
In Conclusion
As you can see, creating a website with SEO in mind isn’t a difficult task, but it’s extremely important if you want your business to be successful. If you follow these simple tips and create a website that is highly relevant to the products or services offered by your company, you will be able to increase your visibility significantly and attract more potential customers to your page.
The guidelines explored in this article will also allow you to create a page that will rank better in search results and drive more traffic to it. However, if you don’t have time for such tasks or simply lack the necessary experience and knowledge, remember that you can always hire a professional who will take care of everything for you.
